明 佚名 游仙圖 卷|Daoist Immortals in a Landscape

Unidentified artist

16th century · Handscroll; ink and color on silk · Asian Art

This painting invites the viewer to follow a mountain path across a stone arch and into a magical realm where herb gatherers dressed in garments of leaves and grass mingle with robed gentlemen engaged in scholarly pleasures: viewing paintings, playing weiqi (go, in Japanese), strumming a zither, composing poetry, engaging in "pure conversation," and contemplating the scenery. The scroll ends with an imposing terrace for viewing the sky and a cave-an entrance to a Daoist grotto-heaven. Based on the two-character signature at the left edge of the scroll, the painting has been identified as the work of Shen Xiyuan, a late fourteenth-century practitioner of the Southern Song academic tradition of Ma Yuan (active ca. 1190–1225). But many of the figural and landscape details reflect the styles of such mid-sixteenth-century artists as Zhou Chen and Qiu Ying, suggesting that a more appropriate date for the scroll would be the later sixteenth or early seventeenth century.

Artist

Unidentified artist

Date

16th century

Medium

Handscroll; ink and color on silk

Culture

China

Department

Asian Art

Credit line

Purchase, Bequest of Dorothy Graham Bennett, 1983